There are a few things that will make me love a game. Good graphics, robots, explosions and an easy-to-use interface. Battle Orb delivers on at least three of these fronts with one of the coolest ideas for a game I've seen. Remember the droidekas from the Star Wars prequels? What's that? You've blocked them from your memory? Well, they were robots that could fold up into balls and roll around a ship's hallways. They were awesome. And in Battle Orb you are that, and it kind of rules. Sort of.

There are two modes that your don't-call-it-a-destroyer has. Ball mode, for traveling down hallways, and battle mode for shooting at things. Battle mode is fairly straightforward. It's a first-person view with on screen buttons for weapons. You can choose between tilt controls, a virtual joystick, or using the touchscreen to look around. Whatever fits your preferred play style.

Where the game gets insanely frustrating, though, is ball mode. The tutorial starts you off navigating a maze in this form, which is done in third-person (because otherwise it would probably be very nauseating). You use tilt controls for movement, and slide left and right with the touchscreen to move the camera. And I hate it. I tried it on my Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 10 and neither worked well. It's unclear if the game is just detecting motion poorly or if I'm bad at tilt controls, but getting the orb to go anywhere on purpose felt like an exercise in futility. To say nothing of the camera ending up on the wrong side of walls.

Once you get into the battle area, though, it's actually a pretty fun game. We'll leave you to decide if the frustrating controls some of the time are worth the effort. The game is free to play, but does have its own in-game currency you can use to buy power-ups, predictably allowing you to spend considerable amounts of real money.